Matanuska Colony 

During the peak of the Great Depression in 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered 203 families from the Great Lakes region the chance to start fresh in the Matanuska Valley, as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal plan to help Americans recover from economic crisis. Like other New Deal resettlement projects, the Matanuska Colony was intended to alleviate chronic unemployment in urban areas and aid Midwestern farmers struck hard by falling prices. Lack of work in the lower states and ample Alaskan land were two reasons for creating the Colony. Historian Orlando Miller argues that a third reason was “nostalgia for the vanished frontier and the opportunity associated with it.”

President Roosevelt shared America’s sentimnetal attachment to farming. But he also used the frontier image to drive policy. To defend against critics of his massive public works projects, the President argued that the New Deal was not merely a welfare program, but appealed to the American frontier heritage of pioneering individualism and self-reliance. In 1932, Roosevelt reasoned that in previous depressions “at the very worst there was always the possibility of climbing into a covered wagon and moving west where the untilled prairies afforded a haven for men to whom the East did not provide a place.”

In 1933, Congress established the Rural Rehabilitation Administration, a division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, to move the unemployed back to American farmlands. But in the 1930s, little open land existed in the West. Alaska, however, was wide open. The administration reasoned that boosting Alaska’s agricultural production might play an important role in supplying troops eventually stationed there. Some government officials even postulated that Alaska could eventually support a larger population at a higher standard of living than all of Scandinavia! Not surprisingly, the government selected Scandinavian farmers from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, believing that they could better endure the harsh northern winters. When advisor Harry Hopkins suggested they bring the program to Alaska, the President was convinced. On April 23, 1935 he authorized the Army transport St. Mihiel to sail with the first colonists.

Joining the colonists was an entourage of journalists, who celebrated the new settlers for carrying out “America’s tradition of pioneering on the last frontier.” But notions of frontier opportunity failed to live up to national expectation. Problems confronted the Matanuska colonists from the beginning. Although the federal government maintained good intentions, it managed the colony badly. The decision to bring up farmers with little knowledge of commercial farming hindered the project from the onset. Within a year, only about 100 families remained at the Colony.

Some families held on. With war building across the Atlantic and the Pacific, the United States military undertook the remilitarization of Alaska in 1940. Suddenly jobs to construct army bases and roads opened up. During the summers, young men from Matanuska took jobs working at Cook Inlet salmon canneries, allowing farmers to supplement their laborious and unpredictable farm work with dependable high wages.

Most historians agree that the colony experiment in Matanuska failed. Alaska farms never found national markets, its population remains a fraction to that of Scandinavia, and by the time war broke out Alaska’s ability to inspire the dream that “free land” would serve American interest had all but vanished. But the Matanuska dream was one that could never come true. Throughout the history of the West, farmers never became self-reliant pioneers. The success of American agricultural always depended on an industrial infrastructure supported by a network of markets and transportation systems - something that Alaska lacked then, and still lacks today.

The significance of the Matanuska colonists and their desire to remain in Alaska illustrates far more realistic activities, responses, and perspectives about people living in frontier regions. From Plymouth, Massachusetts to the Matanuska Valley, colonists learned to adjust to unexpected situation. Some depended on Native Americans to show them which foods to eat, others needed canals and railroads to get their products to markets. And, in the case of the Matanuska colonists, they took advantage of ancillary jobs—from military construction to fishing—to keep farming. Failing to live up to a myth, the Matanuska colonists succeeded in following realistic models of a pioneering past. That success reminds us that the life on the frontier was not about independence and self-reliance, but how people worked together to build a thriving community.